Coaches want no part of it; television executives salivate over the very thought of it.

“I’m not opposed to a different scheduling model,” says SEC commissioner Mike Slive.

And before you get sideways with the thought of teams in the nation’s best conference banging heads one more week during the season, understand this: the nine-game schedule is way down the list of potential tweaks.

These guys can’t even agree on who plays who.

“Nobody says it’s supposed to be fair, anyway,” said South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier, who last year complained about the rotating crossover schedule that had the Gamecocks playing at LSU while East Division rival Georgia “got to play” Ole Miss at home.

“I wonder if a computer might pick a better schedule by random draw,” said LSU coach Les Miles, who has been public in his displeasure of having Florida as a permanent crossover opponent.

So while the Big Ten last weekend announced plans to expand to a nine-game schedule in 2016; while the ACC was committed to nine games beginning in 2014 but backed away only after partnering with Notre Dame; while the Pac-12 and Big 12 currently play nine league games, the last holdout of the five major conferences is still debating semantics of the eight-game schedule.

The move to a nine-game schedule was initially an issue this time last year at the SEC’s annual spring meetings. But like most things in the uber-successful, tradition-first conference, change is slow.

Last year’s meetings got bogged down in the same spot this year’s meetings – later this month in Destin, Fla. – likely will: the schedule format, not the number of games. Currently, the SEC uses a 6-1-1 format (six division games, one permanent crossover, one rotating crossover), with six years needed to rotate through the opposite division once.

That means—and here’s where Alabama coach Nick Saban has a problem—some players will go a career without playing another team from the opposite division. So instead of expanding the rotation of the schedule when the league went to 14 teams, the SEC decided that longstanding rivalries (Alabama vs. Tennessee, Georgia vs. Auburn) and television-friendly games (Florida vs. LSU) were more important as the goliath of a league gets bigger and stronger year after year.

In other words, why fix what clearly hasn’t even sniffed broken? Now throw that nine-game schedule idea into that meeting room later this month and ask Slive to mediate.

Coaches: Why give up a guarantee game (see: guaranteed win) for another league fistfight that could be lost?

Slive: that’s what the new playoff is for. It expands your margin of error – so do the seven straight BCS National Championships.

Coaches: Why give up a home game and the game revenue every other year for another league game?

Slive: That’s what the SEC Network is for. We’re picking cash off trees.

At that point, someone will talk about the Third Saturday in October or the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry or how in the world the team that has won three of the last four national championships got Kentucky as a rotation partner?

Don’t believe it? When Spurrier was asked about the schedule last week, his response quickly veered from just play the game (“Nobody said it’s supposed to be fair, anyway) to a new definition of fair.

“Have you ever heard any commissioner or anybody say it’s supposed to be fair?” Spurrier said. “They’d make the recruiting rules more fair. Right now, it seems like the same team gets all the top players every year in recruiting. We just need to go play whoever they tell us to play and do the best we can, and things will work out, hopefully.”

Welcome to Mike Slive’s world. The man who put together a billion dollar television network and a groundbreaking college football playoff can’t get 14 men in his own conference to agree on anything.